LDS digitizing an index to records

[jimpres]

The Morman church announced it is digitizing an index to its record so you can search from anywhere on this earth.
Excerpt:

Those attending the annual Federation of Genealogical Societies' conference this week at the Salt Palace will get a "sneak preview" of the church's plans. As the project progresses over time, indexes to records from 110 nations previously stored on microfilm will become accessible to virtually anyone, anywhere, through the Internet via the touch of a few keystrokes.
"We're showing people how we'll be creating indexes from those films. Sometime in the future we'll ask people to help us create the indexes and make them publicly available, and little by little we'll start to index the films from the vault like we did with the 1880 (U.S.) Census.
"The challenge now is it takes a lot of people and a lot of time" to create such an index. "Currently, you have to look at images on paper or burn them on a CD and distribute those to index the data. We're moving the whole process to the Internet and this is a prototype of what that might look like. . . . That's what the biggest buzz is at the conference."

Happy Hunting,

Jim

[suzanne]

Jim,
This is great news! It would be so much easier to look records up on the net than to have to go to the LDS centers.

I've gone to our local LDS center a few times this year but have had no luck yet finding anything that pertains to my family. I'd make a lot more progress if I could do these searches in the evenings or weekends.

[jimpres]

Suzanne,

Another great source is Ancestry but they do charge a fee.
It will be nice to access the LDS files from the Net.

Jim

[suzanne]

Yes, Ancestry is a great website, but unfortunately they're not able to help me in the type of thing I'm looking for right now (mid to late 19th century Austro-Hungarian birth and marriage records). They seem to be useful mainly for doing U.S. research.

I seem to have hit a wall in terms of finding more info here in the U.S. and at some point in the future, I think I'm going to have to "cross the pond" and go searching in person for info....!